Correspondence
Correspondence BENJAMIN LAID TO REST? STEPHEN SCHWARTZ'S ARTICLE "The Mysterious Death of Walter Benjamin" (June 11) offers a distinct glimpse into the mindset of Stalinism. The article brings to...
...Given Stalin's xenophobic mentality, just about anyone who went west— much less a blue ribbon parade of German-Jewish Marxist intellectuals—was in great danger (especially during the Nazi-Soviet Pact era) of being liquidated...
...One would hope that Schwartz's further work will make possible the unraveling of this larger mystery and put in realistic context the shadowy death of Walter Benjamin...
...What a great pleasure to read that ribbon of rebellion in a time when test scores, joylessness, and a McDonald's on every corner are the norm...
...What is less subject to doubt is the migratory behavior of the socialists and Communists of the Frankfurt School...
...But I'd rather stay in place with Epstein and duke it out any old day, letting the world come to me...
...It is entirely possible that Walter Benjamin met his end not in the whimper of suicide as is claimed, but with the bang of an assassination as Stephen Schwartz asserts...
...Schwartz's piece therefore raises larger issues: To what degree was this special category of intellectual refugees genuinely in search of freedom, and to what extent were some of the figures sent as advance agents of Soviet espionage...
...Individuals like Walter Benjamin, who knew of Stalinist tyranny firsthand, joined the remaining party Marxists in the long trek to democratic capitalist societies in various stages of assault...
...What a wonderful, lucid essay on this life...
...HARRY FRANCIS MALLGRAVE Vero Beach, FL A HIGHER MOTIVE IN PETER FERRARA'S ARTICLE "The Battle over the Boy Scouts" (June 11), the author recounts various skirmishes in this new culture war, after the Supreme Court held that the Scouts were free to choose their own leaders, and the messages these leaders would send by their own personal example...
...The article brings to the forefront the enormous risks created by the tacit alliance of the Soviet KGB and the Nazi Gestapo during the period of the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939-1941...
...Bravo to iconoclasm, and I look forward to seeing more of this kind of research...
...Thus in the United States we had the anomaly of strong Communist penetration of universities like Columbia and agencies like the Office of Strategic Services...
...IRVING LOUIS HOROWITZ Hannah Arendt Distinguished Professor of Sociology & Political Science Rutgers University New Brunswick, NJ HOW INTERESTING and unexpected— Walter Benjamin gracing your cover...
...Like Twain's flip side, he has pinned down that peculiar and tight-lipped sense of mordant obligation and responsibility to follow the rules, and to do everything to fill that vessel called the mind with all the Great Good Things in that Great Good Place...
...I do so not to dwell on his personal misfortunes but rather to help explain the cultic proportions his "aura" has assumed within every diocese of the liberal academic community...
...The emigres were welcomed for their intellectual merit, ideological fervor, and linguistic skills during World War II...
...As someone who has given several graduate seminars on postmodern theory in the arts, I have always made the issue of Benjamin's death a topic of discussion...
...ALISON HAMBLY Las Vegas, NV...
...The list includes Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Franz Neumann, Leo Lowenthal, Erich Fromm, and many notables who fled Nazi Germany from 1933-1941, a group that with extraordinary uniformity went west—to France, England, and then the United States...
...JAMES G. BAIRD Woodstock, GA TRIPPED OUT JOSEPH EPSTEIN'S REFLECTIONS on the travails of travel ("On the Road Again, Alas," June 11) are as refreshing as those of Mark Twain when he exhorts us to "never let the classroom interfere with our education...
...I've traveled all my life...
...The research of Stephen Schwartz raises many provocative questions and, just as important, sheds light on this era and our political naivete regarding it...
...This leads me to wonder why no one has mentioned the alleged homosexual orientation of Sir Robert Baden-Powell (later Lord Baden-Powell), who founded the Boy Scout movement in 1908...
...Then again, I suppose it really doesn't matter...
...After all, Leon Trotsky did not die in Mexico of old age...
...Clearly, until all archives of this astonishing interregnum are opened to public scrutiny, Schwartz's piece remains subject to the usual (and rightful) demands for smoking guns and hard facts...
Vol. 6 • June 2001 • No. 39
